Dragonfire

In the very far future the Doctor and Mel go to the trading colony of Iceworld, where they meet a time lost young waitress from 20th century Earth named Ace and run into Sabalom Glizt, who is there after the dragonfire, a treasure supposedly hidden under the colony and protected by an actual dragon. But what does this dragon has to do with Kane, the cruel ruler of Iceworld and his plans for building a mercenary army of what are essentially frozen zombies? 

• Seventh Doctor, Mel (Melanie Bush), and Ace
• Iceworld, a trading colony on the dark side of the planet Svartos, 2 million years in the future
• Series 24
• 3 episodes
• 11/23/1987 - 12/7/1987

Comments with major spoilers:

I rather like Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, finding him interesting and engaging, though for the most part his Doctor is not really considered one of the better incarnations. Mainly because he was stuck with embarrassingly bad stories such as Dragonfire. Although in re-watching it, the story was nowhere near as bad as I remembered.  

Not that it's particularly good, because it isn't. The plot can't stand up under even the slightest of scrutiny. It tilts and sways unevenly from goofy comedy to unfriendly grim. The sets and effects look aggressively 80's cheap. All of this to the detriment of the story. Still, there are some bright spots. 

Sylvester McCoy is rather good  here. Things such as his boyish glee at the prospect of exploring the caves below Iceworld, or the simple act of turning his back in disgust at Glitz when it comes out that he sold his crew into slavery, both work to show he's a much better actor than normally given credit for. 

Ace, a strong outgoing teenager that the Doctor takes on as student/protege is introduced here. She is the final companion of the old show, and is one of the best. Some elements of her story are eventually echoed with Rose when the show restarts.  

Sabalon Glitz manages to be a fun character here, not an easy achievement considering he's a murderous amoral mercenary. 

Even with all this however, there are still problems.  So many problems. 

Space Mall:
From the very first image you see of Iceworld, it's a weird place, all oversized crystal/ice towers that loom huge over the top of a planet. So either Iceworld is gigantic, or the planet is really small. Despite the relatively impressive large sets used, it ends up feeling tight and claustrophobic, so tiny Little Prince sized planet seems to be the case. 

Iceworld is described as a trading colony, but from what little of it we see, cheap bargain basement supermarket is a more accurate description. A supermarket with alien customers leading to the first of the many movie rifts that the story plays with, the Doctor Who version of the Star Wars cantina. Although instead of a bar full of scum and villainy, we have a pink ice cream parlor filled with cheap looking aliens drinking milk shakes. 

Cheap looking is a constant here. Many of the sets are unconvincing. Not surprising considering several involve sheets of clear or colored plastic sheets as walls of ice. Walls that move anytime someone runs by them. 

Literal Cliff Hanger:

One of the reasons for the story's poor reputation is the first episode's unfortunate literal cliff hanger, when the Doctor decides to climb over the edge of a cliff and hang off of his umbrella in danger of falling to his death.  Cue closing music.

Supposedly there is an explanation given in the script, that he'd reached a dead end and the only way left he could go was to go down. Unfortunately this does not make it into the actual episode leaving us with a bad visual pun that looks silly, and has no real impact because the Doctor intentionally puts himself into danger for no reason at all. 

The dangling Doctor scene is used in the modern series episode The Name of the Doctor when Clara Oswald splits herself along the Doctor's timeline in order to save him. This implies that somewhere in Iceworld there was a Clara "clone." For her troubles she gets to watch her hero climb over a cliff like an idiot. As is, if there was a "Clara" present, she was likely one of Iceworld's customers, so odds are she ended up blown up dead by the end of the story. Actually, considering the high mortality rates for incidental characters in Doctor stories, the majority of the Clara's probably ended up blown up. 

Kryptonian jail sentences:

One of the many, many weird parts of the story involves Kane's exile. It is revealed that Kane is a criminal, and as punishment his people do a very planet Krypton thing and punish him in an extremely overly complicated and jerky way. One that accidentally results in him outliving his people.

They send him off in a spaceship (which turns out to be Iceworld itself), disable it, then leave the key to it's repair with his jailer, the dragon that lurks around under Iceworld and pretty much leaves Kane alone. 

Thing is, this isn't even the weird part yet. The weird part is that Kane decides to turn his dead spaceship jail into a supermarket. An extremely successful one. So much so that thousands of years later he is rich and powerful enough to buy any number of battle ships and go back home. Except he doesn't. He becomes very myopic about the situation and obsesses that he can only return home using the Iceworld space ship. 

Beyond myopic, he's just a strange villain. Edward Peel who plays Kane spends a lot of time chewing up the scenery. This isn't as bad as it sounds. In one scene especially, one of the best of the story, he comes off as very menacing when he temps Ace with the opportunity to join him.

But for the most part, that scene is an exception. He spends the majority of the story asleep in his deep freezer as if he were sort of a frozen dinner Space Dracula asleep in his high tech coffin. The Dracula idea is reinforced when Kane meets his end by standing in sunlight in a scene that rifts off of the Indiana Jones melting nazis. For a kids show his melty death is rather gruesome.

Coming and Going:

Besides introducing Ace, the story sees the departure of Mel. Poor Mel never really had a chance at being a good companion. As written her only real function was to be annoyingly chipper, scream, and get into trouble.

For example, in Dragonfire, when she's not screaming, she sits around doing nothing, or she helps Ace explore caves, with Ace visibly in charge rather than the other 'round. At one point she even manages to knock herself unconscious while trying to run up some stairs. About the best thing she ever does is suddenly leave the show letting McCoy give a great speech about the nature of time. 

The randomness of her sudden departure has caused loads of fan speculation and theories. It never really bothered me though because in the old show it was fairly common for companions to leave the Doctor quickly without much fanfare (or logic in the explanations that the writers came up to explain actors leaving the show). As is, deciding on a whim to hang out with a corrupt mercenary is a much better send off then the standard explanation of having a female companion falling in instant love with a boring, just introduced, minor male one-shot character. 

While her leaving never bothered me, there is a part of the ending that does. Having the character of Glitz present means that Dragonfire takes place a couple of million years in the future (his time was established in his introductory story Mysterious Planet).

This a little confusing because Glitz offers to take Ace back home to Earth, specifically to her home town of Perryvale using the Iceworld spaceship.  But her home is 20th century Earth. So is he implying that the Iceworld spaceship can time travel? And if it can time travel, why did Kane care that his home planet is dead, when he could just go back into the past when it was still alive? It makes no sense. 

The truth is that I'm reading far too much into a couple lines of dialogue that were not meant to be thought about too much. Most of the story is like that. No thinking allowed. But despite this and the other faults, cheapness and weirdness aside, it's surprisingly not too bad and at three episodes long not to lengthy. 

Death Rate:

Extremely high. Other then the Doctor and friends, almost everyone present ends up dead. Unfortunately among the survivors are the annoyingly cute little girl and her equally annoying mother, who seems to have been so busy shopping she never bothered to notice there was a massacre going on.

Random bits:

• Kane's preferred method of killing people, freezing them to death with his touch is cool, pun unintended, but is yet another thing that shouldn't be thought about too much, mainly because if a warm patch of sunlight is enough to kill him, how was touching warm blooded humans not boiling him to death or at least causing his hands to melt off? 
• It wasn't until rewatching the episode and seeing Kane die in a batch of bright light that I realized that the new show had borrowed this idea of fatal unfiltered sunlight for the episode The End of the World.
• While most of the movie references vary from cute to insignificant, I do really like the "ANT HUNT" scene that is pretty much lifted straight from Aliens when two of Kane's lackeys hunt the Alien, er Dragon. 
• The character of Mel is currently my least favorite companion. I even prefer Adrich to her. There was at least some depth and characterization to his annoying personality. The ornery side of my personality though has me half tempted to take my disdain for her and try to write some fan fiction with one solitary goal. To make her interesting.